I Spent $1500 to Fix Ryobi's Mistake

I've invented something I call it the Horseless Carriage now I know you all like your horses and you like your carriages and you like their whole lifestyle but I think you're going to really like this just give it a shot I think this is going to catch on onward last year I told you why you shouldn't buy this Mower and it's almost entirely because of the batteries for whatever reason Ryobi decided to put lead acid batteries in this thing and after a mere one year of using this it lost enough capacity where I couldn't mow my entire yard on a single charge now after another year of service that's two years total for you keeping track at home the batteries have lost so much capacity I can't even get through a third of my yard on a single charge and they're so weak this mower now bogs down on the thinnest of grass these batters are toast and it's time for an upgrade it's time to give this thing proper lithium batteries you know like Ryobi should have done from the beginning oh I found the controllers it's going to say this might be easy let's get it off before I say that all right there's lots of observations here but first of all kudos to Ryobi taking this thing apart was super easy all of the Fasteners were exactly the same no different ones at all none of them were hidden it was just easy straightforward and sensical I like that before taking all the plastic cladding off I was worried the lithium batteries I chose wouldn't fit in here but uh I seem to have been worried about nothing because this thing is 90 battery this takes up so much space anyway rest of it here's the main high voltage disconnect there's a main high voltage fuse here this is some sort of controller box for the charge port that was sitting right here got your main contactor a little DC to DC converter over here control board you can see the little dampers for the control arms and right up here in a row is all of the brushless motor controllers you got three little ones for the motors on the deck and then two big ones for the drive Motors this thing is really simple and I really really appreciate it this DC to DC converter here that steps to 48 volts down to 12 volts I instantly recognized it because I didn't think it had one I didn't think it had any sort of 12 volts circuitry on it at all so for the conversion I bought one myself here's the DC to DC converter on the mower from the factory and here's the one I bought off Amazon I bought a random one off Amazon and it happens to be pretty much a direct replacement it's got the bolt holes in the same place and everything I appreciate the Simplicity of this design and the use of off-the-shelf components in a lot of different places but it also irritates me because they're still charging five thousand dollars for this mower with batteries that are going to turn into bricks in a matter of a couple years now they do sell a new electric zero turn with proper lithium batteries but that's seven thousand dollars for the 54 inch deck variant Ryobi stop price gouging that's ridiculous these mowers are not worth that much money if they were the same price as equivalently spec gas mowers they'd probably outsell them but now they're almost double the price stop it okay it's clear now Ryobi wanted me to take this apart everything all of the wires are labeled even down here in the body work and all over everything is labeled there's no question of what anything is this is amazing one little annoyance I got to turn on but it won't turn on if I disconnect the charge port so there must be some sort of high voltage interlock or something in the charge port that keeps it from turning on without that connected so that'll be a little issue to work through charging controller well that answers what that is long Bolt holy crap it's worth noting these batteries are on a slide out tray you take off the bumper there's a grab handle on the tray it's mounted on some slippery plastic rail so it slides out easily these batteries were designed to be replaced and replaced easily of course the problem is Ryobi didn't advertise that it has lead acid batteries they didn't advertise you're going to have to replace them every couple of years and what happens when you got a guy just an ordinary person doesn't know anything about battery chemistry walks into Home Depot plops down five grand on a mower and has to replace the battery after a couple of years that's how you ruin brand reputations what batteries are going in the mower what took you so long to ask these are three modules I pulled out of one of my spare codas last year most of the modules out of that battery pack were six cells in series like this one but the two modules at the back of the pack where it was narrower are five in series which is perfect because these three is strung together gives me a 16s configuration bringing my nominal voltage of the whole pack to 51.2 volts perfect to replace the 48 volt pack that I pulled out of the mower these three modules make up 4.8 kilowatt hours of total energy the lead acid pack I pulled out of the mower when it was new it's nowhere near this now but when it was new was nameplate rated to 5.5 kilowatt hours but that's not entirely true because they're lead acid batteries as state of charge decline so does the voltage pretty dramatically So Below about 50 state of charge or so they don't have anywhere near the power they did when they were fully charged and if you drop them below 20 state of charge it damages them so it's not really 5.5 kilowatt hours realistically this is more capacity than the mower originally had real quick these are lithium iron phosphate cells which is different from other lithium chemistries which I'm going to lump into a big group called lithium ion these operate at 3.2 volts nominal lithium ion is 3.6 these are more resilient they're stable they're more fireproof they're longer lasting in terms of cycle life and just overall life expectancy they can be charged to 100 repeatedly without degradation unlike lithium ion they're cheaper to make and they don't have the Rare Minerals nickel Cobalt manganese and some other things they only have lithium in them the one downside of lithium iron phosphate is that it's less energy dense modern lfp cells are about two-thirds of the energy density of equivalent lithium ion but these are 12 years old so they're even less than that that's right these are 12 years old and they haven't been charged for at least eight of those years and all of the battery cells are at exactly the same voltage these are Rock Solid batteries all electric mowers should use lithium-ion phosphate batteries but none of them do they use more energy dense lithium ion cells they're charged to 100 percent their entire life they have no active Cooling and they die quickly but you know who does use lithium-ion phosphate batteries today's sponsor the Anker 757 portable power station by anchor oh no not another solar generator this isn't just another solar generator this one's special and we'll get to why later but first the basics this beautiful little box has 1.5 kilowatts of AC output with six Outlets four USB a ports two USBC ports a 12 volt car socket right here that I just stuck my finger into because I'm an idiot good thing it wasn't turned on and 1.2 kilowatt hours of battery storage oh and you can't forget the light which you can barely see because it's the middle of the day the built-in screen tells you state of charge input and output watts and some other stuff how do you power it well there's several ways the 757 comes with three ways to that's not three three ways to charge in the Box it comes with a 12 volt car adapter so you can trickle charge it from your car I'm doing it right now I'm getting 110 Watts for my huge battery going into this little one you can charge it from the Sun this thing accepts it to 300 watts of solar panel input do please note that holding up a solar panel like a weirdo in the middle of a parking lot is optional and if it means anything to you this does solar charging via mppt rather than pwm if that doesn't mean anything to you it just means it charges more efficiently and of course you can charge it from a regular old wall outlet and if you do so this thing pulls a whole kilowatt from the wall so it can go from zero to eighty percent in just an hour fully charged in 1.2 hours what can you use it for I mean just about anything really it's got 1.5 km watts of AC output which can power just about anything including this incredibly power hungry ceramic heater it's going no problem and like I said earlier it's got these six USB ports and the 12 volt car socket this thing could charge your phone like a billion times this light on here could run for basically infinity and it can charge the largest battery MacBook Pro over a dozen times before it itself would need recharging and the best part about this 757 the battery chemistry this thing uses lithium iron phosphate just like what I'm putting in my Mower and it has the same benefits here much higher life expectancy than other lithium chemistries at 3 000 cycles and it likes to be charged to a hundred percent all the time other lithium chemistries that'll shorten their lifespan not with this portable power like this is incredibly useful for instance last year I took a road trip in my pickup where I was too cheap to get hotels so I slept in the back of my pickup and used this little ceramic heater powered off of one of these guys to keep warm at night and during the day while I was driving I trickle charge it off the 12 volt car socket if you'd like to check out the Anker 757 for yourself click the link in the description below this video and get access to an exclusive 150 off coupon thanks again to anchor for sponsoring this video now back to the mower now you can't just drop lithium cells where lead acid batteries were designed to go hook everything up and it'd all be good there's some stuff you have to change but first I need to make these physically fit because as of right now they don't okay that was much easier than I thought it was going to be I had to rotate this battery module this way I had to put this one on its side but they all fit this one's a little bit longer than the tray is wide so it's sitting on top of the tray and I've got all of these modules sitting on a little foam pad it's just an anti-fatigue mat from Harbor Freight and this one's sitting on a double layer of that but that's it I've already got them lashed down and everything lithium batteries need a BMS battery management system in order to prevent the batteries from being overcharged over discharge and to keep all the cells balanced to the same voltage there's lots of cheap and easy options that are perfectly fine on Amazon eBay and any number of other sites but since I enjoy this sort of thing and since I got my batteries for free I overdid it a little bit and got full on EV components from Thunderstruck Motors this is the MCU master control unit from Thunderstruck it combines their BMS controller and their EV charge controller yes I'm going to be using their charger as well into one unit and this is the BMS satellite with 18 cell inputs as you can see I've been busy I've got all the modules wired up any day I get to use the hydraulic crimper is a good day and I've got all of the balance leads run to the individual cell groups and centralized into this harness that plugs into the BMS satellite unit now I need to make a plate that mounts on top of this module to mount all of my componentry now it has occurred to me that it is so clear it doesn't look like there's polycarbonate here but I assure you there is one downside of going with the MCU is it needs a permanent 12 volt Supply that the mower doesn't have there's no 12 volt battery in it so I've decided I'm going to put a 12 volt battery in it it might as well be lead acid that's why I put another step down converter on here it's just to keep this battery charged and I want to keep the two 12 volt electrical systems separate this state of charge indicator was pretty useless to begin with but now with a different battery chemistry it won't work at all so I got this replacement which got to say more than a passing resemblance it even has a very similar connector on the back not the same but similar anyway this new one communicates over can to the BMS it'll give me state of charge min max pack voltages the whole pack voltage and a bunch of other stuff all right I wired up everything off camera because wiring on camera is boring I've got the BMS connected to all the individual cell leads and communicating to the MCU the MCU is connected to 12 volts power and ground to this little tiny battery here the can high and low go to the state of charge indicator I just showed you and these two output leads are the output from the MCU that trigger when either the key is on or it's charging and they activate the DC to DC relay here to turn this guy on to charge this battery so this battery will be charged when the mower is either on or charging I've got this relay here triggered by the key on the mower that goes to the key switch input on the MCU and I think that's it let's turn everything on the MCU blinked now let's plug this in turn the key on listen for contactors and relays oh what does that mean I don't know what that means okay I didn't figure out the blinking yet but I found so many things I did wrong what kind of idiot zip ties all the wiring in place before testing it shut up both of these relays are rated for 12 volts I've got 48 volts going through them I thought oh that'd be fine it wasn't this one melted pretty quickly and I've got the outputs wired wrong I totally misinterpreted what out 5 and out 5 12 volt mint and I've got them switched to nothing so they don't work I need to rewire that but in positive news I got the MCU connected to the serial interface and I've been fiddling around with the settings and you know I set all the cells that are exactly the same voltage they're within one one thousandth of a volt of each other I am an idiot and I keep making mistakes this is the second DC to DC converter that I've had on here because the first one when I had that accidental shorting thing because I had it wired backwards I killed it so I ordered this one I just put it on there and this battery ground right here floated too close to the battery you might even be able to see the Char Marks here and kill this one too so in order to third one if Amazon didn't have one day shipping this would take a whole week all right you joined me days later I can't believe how annoying this wiring has been I've killed two DC to DC converters I've completely reconfigured the wiring here let me show you the initial setup was 12 volt battery decent to DC converter to charge that 12 volt battery and the DC to DC converter was turned on and off by an output from the MCU that setup proved to be so difficult to implement that I got rid of the 12 volt battery entirely and now this DC to DC converter which you'll notice is much smaller than what I had before is just permanently connected to the 48 volt battery and feeding 12 volts to this whole system here will it drain the 48 volt battery yes but extremely slowly so I'm okay with that and my state of charge indicator doesn't work there's a good chance that I killed it like I said I killed the two DC to DC converters that came before this by accidentally shorting them with the 48 volt battery and this was connected to the same circuit as those when that happened so I probably killed this so for right now I don't have a state of charge indicator I do have this alarm and I've hooked it up to one of the outputs on the MCU and I have it triggered when either there's a low cell voltage or low pack voltage so this is the only state of charge I get right now charger I can't go where it said for lead acid profile charging voltage doesn't work so I've got a new charger and again I went overboard this is the TSM 2500 charger from Thunderstruck Motors this is a proper EV charger now the charger that came with the mower I've measured it it can deliver about 300 350 watts to charge the batteries this one could do 2500 and of course I got it with a j1772 port so I can use any EV charger including public ones I could Rock up to public charging stations in my Mower and Juice up now of course the tricky part is where do I put this unfortunately while I do have enough space right here on top of this module to mount this charger and it even clears the plastic cover that goes on top of it I can't put it here because this is an air cooled charger and the plastic cover would go less than an inch over the top of it restricting the airflow and potentially causing the charger to overheat so instead I'm going to mount it on the back of the mower right about here yes I'm going to have an ugly charger looking wart on the back of my mower no I don't care that much okay I care a little bit but this is where it's going here we go I mean it's waterproof and dust proof and everything so there's no problem with it being mounted to the back by the way if you're wondering why I mounted the charger off to the side and not centered it's because the hitch is right there I actually use it and I didn't want the charger above the hitch and obstructing usage of it I've got the charge port all wired up load neutral ground proximity and pilot oh that hole needs to be bigger crap that happened instantly there's even feasible for me to know because it can just pull through I just made a big ugly hole all this is is a light that flashes to indicate that it's charging that's that's it that's what this mistake was okay off camera I finished up the wiring everything's just kind of slapped together in place right now but together for the first time on camera we're going to test the charging and see if it works it's just a 110 evse let's plug it in see if it says charging see if this light blinks see if the charger comes on I'm nervous foreign nothing's happening okay I checked the wiring and it seemed to be fine and then I read through the manual and found a warning in there written in red that said the charge port and the MCU must be connected to the same ground in order for the proximity in the pilot to communicate properly I didn't know that before so I've added a chassis ground for both the j1772 and the MCU and let's try it again I don't expect it to be that simple but let's be optimistic oh it's a challenge welcome to my dark garage I've temporarily evicted my pole star back there so I can watch my mower charge how exciting is that I want to monitor everything while this charges to 100 for the first time make sure all the settings are right and it doesn't overcharge and etc etc and I want to do it in here because the evsc I have installed in here has a display that shows the current readout so I can at a glance see how much power it's pulling from the wall now if you excuse me I'm going to watch a mower charge for about 30 minutes all right it's the next day I've just finished mowing my yard and it's done it all in one charge how novel mowing the yard took me an hour the grass was pretty overgrown so this thing was working pretty hard and according to the mcu's voltage-based estimate I used 10 of the battery to mow the whole yard I don't believe that number that seems impossible before I started mowing the average cell voltage was 3.33 volts and after I finished it was 3.25 volts so yes I gave this mower enough battery capacity frankly it lasted so long that it makes me want to keep mowing until the battery dies but I don't have enough yard for that yeah you may have noticed from some of the images I just showed you that I started out with 84 indicated state of charge that's because I had troubles charging this thing last night I had a couple of the cell Banks Rise Above the Rest of the pack and kept hitting the high voltage cut off while the rest of the pack was still at 3.4 ish volts so I couldn't get it 100 fully charged later on I'll play around with different high voltage cutoffs and top balancing Etc and just fiddle around with it and maybe I can get 100 charge but really it doesn't matter because I've got it so much capacity in here apparently that I can mow my yard two times or three times over on one charge and I'm happy to report the performances back up to where it was when it was new this year with the lead acid batteries being completely toast this thing was so weak it was practically unusable now it's back to where it was when I bought it brand new though to be fair it's still underpowered but it's still perfectly usable and it's nowhere near as underpowered as the numbers would suggest because there's a fuse I'm sitting on right now on this 48 volt battery pack that fuse is 125 amps 125 amps at 48 volts is 6 kilowatts that's eight horsepower that is the maximum fused output for all five mowers that's terrible now it doesn't feel that underpowered but there's a reason Ryobi does not advertise the power figures for this mower I still have a couple of small things left to do to this mower I need to order a new state of charge display to replace the one that I broke I need to put the plastic back panel back on the mower but first I need to trim it to fit around the charger I need to order a new shoot because I broke that one off and I need to sharpen the mower blades but aside from those little things I've got a functioning mower again and I'm sure my neighbors are very happy about it because my yard has been becoming a jungle over the past couple of weeks if you have one of these Ryobi Zero Turn Mowers and you're wondering what it would take to lithium swap it don't be intimidated by all the work and money I just put into my mower what I did was over complicated and totally unnecessary I just did it because I enjoy this sort of thing and I wanted to play around with some of those components the easy and cheap route for lithium swapping a Ryobi Zero Turn Mower is drop-in replacement lithium iron phosphate batteries they're 12 volts they're shaped like lead acid batteries they go take up about the same space and they have built-in bms's and other battery management circuitry so all you have to do is take them and put them where the lead acid batteries used to be and change nothing else even the charger will work the same that's the cheap and easy route and they're not terribly expensive either they're 250 300 bucks per battery and you need four of them so that is what I suggest if you want to do this yourself don't go at all the work that I did unless you enjoy it do I call it the Horseless Carriage foreign

Channel: Aging Wheels

Views: 442,085

Keywords: lifepo4, lfp, lithium, lead acid, thunderstruck, swap, mower, zero turn, zt540e

Id: RQVa48RJ1_E

Length: 21min 41sec (1301 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023